“Instead of making the statement, ask a question that will then allow you to make the statement.” – Jeff Bajorek in today’s Tip 117
Do you have your own list of questions?
Join the conversation below and share a couple of questions you came up with!
Jeff’Bajorek on LinkedIn
Jeff’Bajorek on YouTube
jeffbajorek.com
Here are the examples that Jeff sent along for inclusion on the post page:
Example statement 1: We provide PR/Outreach services for authors to get the word out about their books
Example statement 2: We have long-standing relationships with prominent media outlets in major cities
Question 1: Have you considered utilizing a PR firm to promote your book?
Question 2: Beyond social media, have you considered other means of reaching your audience like local radio/print media?
Question 3: If you could have the help of prominent local media to promote your work in major cities, would that help you reach more people where they are selling more books?
Question 4: How are you planning to target specific metro areas for your book launch? Have you thought about using a PR company with relationships in that market?
Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jeff Bajorek’s back, and he just keeps outdoing himself with these tips. Here he is:
Jeff Bajorek: Today, I want to go back to basics with you in your outreach. I would have thought that this concept was a little too basic until it came up on three different calls with three different clients in three completely different industries today. So I know there’s something relevant here for you. Now, you’ve undoubtedly got a handful of ways that you can differentiate yourself from your competition. Let’s say there are five different ways that you can make statements that will differentiate you. Okay? Something that is going to matter to people if they were engaged in listening to you, except they’re not. That’s where the outreach comes in, right? So I want you to take those five points and turn them into five questions. Very, very simple. Instead of making the statement, ask a question that will then allow you to make the statement. Better yet, I want you to turn each one of those statements into two questions. Now you’ve got 10 different conversation starters that will all lead back to something that creates a conversation around how you can differentiate yourself and that’s where sales happen. Now you’ve got 10 questions. That’s a cadence for you over the course of 12 weeks or a quarter, 13 a quarter, right? If you can do that, that’s a little less frequently than once a week, which is pretty much a good rule of thumb for cold outreach, and you can repeat that cadence. I would suggest not automating it, but you have something, you can go to that over the course of a quarter, you can touch a prospect 10 different times. By the time you get to the end of that quarter, you can note any progress that you’ve made or not. You can tweak those questions as much or as little as you need to, and you can repeat that process. You see, after three months, if you ask a question again or try to start a conversation again with something that you used three months ago, your prospect isn’t going to notice, okay? They’re not going to recognize it. You’re not going to get stuck as someone who a one trick pony or a 10 trick pony in this case. You are going to be just trying those same questions, those same conversations starters from a different angle. You can feasibly repeat this four times over the course of year and get a year’s worth of outreach out of this single thought exercise. Look, obviously you can tweak it from there. You can make it more advanced. You can get into automation, you can get into drip campaigns, you can do all that stuff, but at its core, understand a handful of ways that you differentiate yourself from your competition and you can turn that into an outreach plan that you can execute on regularly rather than making it improvisational every time you feel like you have to pick up the phone, which leads to call reluctance and doubt and everything else that leads to your lack of success right now. It can be this simple and it doesn’t take a lot of work to do the prep. Just make sure you’ve got something you can execute on and then go and do it.
Scott Ingram: To make this idea just a little bit more concrete I asked Jeff to put together a few examples. You can find those at DailySales.Tips/117. While you’re there, share a couple of questions you came up with. Better yet, come back and share your results if you actually do the work and execute on this approach.
Then come back tomorrow for another sales tip where we’re going to talk about mindset, and if you’re getting value from these tips please do me a favor and tell just one friend in sales. They’ll thank you for it, and so will I.
Thanks for listening!